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About Gustave Flaubert Gustave Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen, a bustling provincial capital on the Seine about sixty miles from Paris. His father was the eminent Dr. Achille-Cleophas Flaubert, director and chief surgeon of the Hotel Dieu, the municipal hospital. He had an older brother, Achille, who became a doctor, and a greatly beloved younger sister, Caroline. The family lived in a residential wing attached to the Hotel-Dieu. "The dissecting room of the hospital," he later recalled, "gave on our garden. How many times my sister and I used to climb the trellis, cling to the vines, and peer curiously at the cadavers on their slabs! The sun shone on them, and the same flies that were flitting about us and about the flowers would light on them and come buzzing back to us..." He began writing at an early age. After attending the royal lycee, Flaubert found himself in Paris, studying--with great repugnance-- the "pretty science" of the law. In the summer of 1842, he complained to a friend: "I am so harassed by it all that the other night I dreamed of the law! I felt ashamed at having so dishonored dreaming." Late in January 1844, on the road from Deauville to Honfleur, Flaubert collapsed and was "carried away in a sea of flame." He had suffered a severe seizure, probably some form of epilepsy. He now abandoned, without regret, the "flatly bourgeois... wooden benches of the Law School," and retired to a small eighteenth-century chateau at Croisset, a village on the Seine a few miles below Rouen. With a commitment almost monastic in its purity, he now devoted his life to writing. Twenty-five years later Flaubert would write George Sand from Croisset: "I see no one, I know nothing about anything, I live like a stuffed bear." Dr. Flaubert died in January 1846, and within nine weeks, Caroline had succumbed to an infection she had developed after giving birth to her first child. In April, Flaubert wrote to a friend: "...my recent bereavements have saddened me but not surprised me. Without feeling them any the less acutely, I have analyzed them as an artist. This task has revived my grief in a melancholy way. Had I expected better things of life, I should have cursed it. That is just what I have not done." A sculptor was commissioned to execute a portrait bust of Caroline, and on a day in late July, Flaubert arrived at the artist's studio in Paris with his sister's death mask. It was a fateful day for the young writer. Louise Colet, a well-known poet and a great beauty, happened to be posing for the sculptor that day, and Flaubert was soon plunged into a tumultuous, ill-starred affair that is now one of the most celebrated in literary history. Colet was to be the recipient of some of Flaubert's most important letters, and they form a particularly fascinating record of his tortuous struggles with Madame Bovary, on which he labored for five years. Although his later novels Salammbo (1862) and Sentimental Education (1869) were either misunderstood or dismissed by most critics, Flaubert was revered by other writers. Henry James called him a "novelist's novelist," and his impact on the literary culture which followed him was profound. Nabokov stated the case categorically: "Without Flaubert there would have been no Marcel Proust in France, no James Joyce in Ireland. Chekhov in Russia would not have been quite Chekhov. So much for Flaubert's literary influence." Flaubert maintained many close friendships with the leading lights of the Parisian literary world, and his correspondence with such distinguished writers as George Sand and Ivan Turgenev ranks him indisputably as one of the world's great letter writers. He died suddenly on May 8, 1880, at Croisset. A press clipping found on his writing table described him as "one of the uncontested masters of the contemporary novel, perhaps the only one who owes nothing to anyone, and whom everyone else has more or less imitated." Excerpted from The New York Public Library Collector's Edition of Madame Bovary copyright 1997 The New York Public Library | |
